I picked up a freebie code for a copy of Fury: The Awakening (The Scorned, #1), by R.E. Sargent. I’m considering this a bonus Awakening. It doesn’t actually meet the specifications of my Awakening Challenge, since the name isn’t simply Awakening. But I had chores to do today and wanted to listen to an audio book, so I figured I might as well stay on theme.

Stephanie Duran hoped for the American dream – a husband, a family, a house with a white-picket fence – but every man she ever trusted betrayed her. Forsaken by her last lover, Stephanie finally understands that the American dream will never be her reality. Devastated and emotionally destroyed, she pours all her anger-fueled energy into remodeling her new house – the one part of her dream she could control – when an unexplained phenomenon bestows upon her the mysterious power to right wrongs before they happen. Suddenly empowered and in control of fate, Stephanie finds herself immersed in a world of strange events and discovers too late that she has unwittingly unleashed pure evil.

Fury: The Awakening….or Fury: Birth Of a Failed Vigilante as I would rename it. Good lord, I was pretty much bored for the entirety of this audio book. By the end, I was listening to it at 1.5x normal speed, something that pretty much destroys the listening experience (which would have been fine otherwise) and also something I generally never do. But I just wanted to be done.

The book started strongly, with the main character finding out her fiance is cheating on her and responding appropriately. But after that it took a sharp left into blands-ville. She buys the house and the reader sits through chapter after chapter of her fixing everything up. *Yawn*

Then the Quantum-Leap style time/space hops start and the reader sits through the endless tedious details of her figuring everything else, going on hops, learning to shoot, fight, etc, and then going on one last big hop before everything comes to an end. There’s no over-arcing story line to make this interesting. It’s just a progression of this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened until the end.

And the reader never even learns the story behind the original owner of the house or how the house because the gateway (or whatever) it apparently is. It’s all just dropped. All in all, the writing is fine (though the author sucks at writing female-female dialogue) but I was, as I said, bored by the story.